Just a quick update on a pre­vi­ous post about prob­lems with BBC HD in Win­dows 7 Media Cen­ter when using ATI video cards.

As I have poin­ted out on Nigel Dessau’s Blog (closed by AMD since this art­icle was pub­lished), the length of time cus­tom­ers have had to wait for a fix to this issue is now bey­ond reas­on­able. ATI should stop blam­ing Microsoft (even if this is a legit­im­ate lay­ing of blame) and imple­ment their own fix. If a driver fix is not pos­sible then ATI should work on enabling the avivo codec in Liv­eTV by mak­ing it con­form to Microsoft’s DRM require­ments (as Cyber­link have appar­ently done with the Power­D­VD codec).

Whilst ATI and Microsoft are respons­ible for not fix­ing this prob­lem, I would also like to take this oppor­tun­ity to thank the BBC for cre­at­ing it. Tweak­ing their encod­ing pro­cess has not only cre­ated this prob­lem, but it has also reduced the qual­ity of their HD broad­casts even when they are play­able. It’s all well and good cre­at­ing stun­ning pro­grammes like “Plan­et Earth” but it’s barely worth it if they are then so heav­ily com­pressed for broad­cast they look noth­ing like the qual­ity of HD that is obtained from a phys­ic­al medi­um (i.e. BluRay). Stop wast­ing spec­trum with all those chan­nels that no-one watches and start broad­cast­ing HD as it ought to be seen!

In the mean­time here are the places to keep check­ing for pro­gress with this issue…

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